news you won't find in the mainstream media

British MPs reject military intervention in Syria

What the Assault on Whistleblowers Has to Do With War on Syria

Without whistleblowers, the mainline media outlets are more transfixed than ever with telling the official story. And at a time like this, the official story is all about spinning for war on Syria.

Every president who wants to launch another war can’t abide whistleblowers. They might interfere with the careful omissions, distortions and outright lies of war propaganda, which requires that truth be held in a kind of preventative detention.

By mid-week, media adrenalin was at fever pitch as news reports cited high-level sources explaining when the U.S. missile attacks on Syria were likely to begin, how long they might last, what their goals would be. But what about other (potential) sources who have documents and other information that contradict the official story?

It’s never easy for whistleblowers to take the risk of exposing secret realities. At times like these, it’s especially difficult -- and especially vital -- for whistleblowers to take the chance.

When independent journalist I.F. Stone said “All governments lie and nothing they say should be believed,” he was warning against the automatic acceptance of any government claim. That warning becomes most crucial when a launch of war is imminent. That’s when, more than ever, we need whistleblowers who can leak information that refutes the official line.

There has been a pernicious method to the madness of the Obama administration’s double-barreled assault on whistleblowers and journalism. Committed to a state of ongoing war, Obama has overseen more prosecutions of whistleblowers than all other presidents combined -- while also subjecting journalists to ramped-up surveillance and threats, whether grabbing the call records of 20 telephone lines of The Associated Press or pushing to imprisonNew York Times reporter James Risen for not revealing a source.

Adam Kokesh From Federal Prison 130826

Congress Should Veto Obama’s War

“Congress doesn’t have a whole lot of core responsibilities,” said Barack Obama last week in an astonishing remark.

For in the Constitution, Congress appears as the first branch of government. And among its enumerated powers are the power to tax, coin money, create courts, provide for the common defense, raise and support an army, maintain a navy and declare war.
But, then, perhaps Obama’s contempt is justified.

For consider Congress’ broad assent to news that Obama has decided to attack Syria, a nation that has not attacked us and against which Congress has never authorized a war.

Why is Obama making plans to launch cruise missiles on Syria?

According to a “senior administration official … who insisted on anonymity,” President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people last week in the two-year-old Syrian civil war.

But who deputized the United States to walk the streets of the world pistol-whipping bad actors. Where does our imperial president come off drawing “red lines” and ordering nations not to cross them?

Neither the Security Council nor Congress nor NATO nor the Arab League has authorized war on Syria.

American Drone

Don’t You dare criticize Barack Obama—after all he’s ‘black’

The very fact that those who lodge legitimate and strong criticism of drone man, ‘kill list,’ NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA spy master Barack Obama are labeled as being racist is, in itself, perhaps the strongest indicator of just how deeply embedded hypocrisy and racism continue to be in U.S. society.

Somehow the U.S. constitutional rights to free speech and the free flow of information, etc., allegedly enjoyed by the struggling everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation, have been made null and void, because a colored, partially black man, is in the White House as chief executive and commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. The reality of this psychological and political enslavement and repression is in fact hypocrisy and so-called political correctness on steroids.

The pathetic and subservient U.S. corporate-stream media (including MSNBC, FOX, CBS, PBS, NBC, and ABC, etc.), along with the corporate-owned politicians of the Democrat and Republican parties are deliberately stifling free speech and the open and honest free flow of information and informed debate by covertly and/or overtly playing the color card against the common interests of the everyday people of this nation. Make no mistake about it—they are in fact reinforcing hypocrisy and racism.

Much of the ‘leadership’ of so-called ‘liberals, conservatives, progressives, and leftists’ are also deeply complicit in perpetuating this psychological and political enslavement of the everyday ordinary people of ALL colors in this nation. They are systemic gatekeepers whose mission it is to keep us all on the Democrat and Republican [i.e. Republicrat] party plantation.

Moreover, the occasional fake political skirmishes for public consumption, between the ‘leadership’ of the corporate-owned Democrats and Republicans, also serve precisely this same purpose—to keep us perpetually enslaved on the Democrat and Republican plantation. If this nation is to change its course, and survive and thrive, it can no longer be merely about Black power, White power, Brown power, Red Power, or Yellow power. It had better damn well be about Everyday Ordinary PEOPLE power of ALL colors! It’s time to get off of the plantation!

IMF Head Christine Lagarde in Court

Kinship or Citizenship?

It’s hard to remember back to the Margaret Mead era when cultural anthropology was the neuroscience of its day, the glamor subject for aspiring middlebrows. During the early Cold War, more than few Americans diligently tried to take an intelligent interest in the vast array of foreign cultures that were suddenly deemed of strategic importance to the new American empire, so the insights of anthropologists were in popular demand.

Unfortunately, cultural anthropologists soon lost sight of the forest for the trees, leading to a glut of unreadably detailed studies, such as our current President’s mother’s 1,043-page dissertation on Indonesian blacksmithery. In turn, the public lost interest in alien cultures. Barack Obama, for example, who had been raised to be a diplomat or international affairs scholar, moved to insular Illinois in hopes of becoming mayor of Chicago.

This decline in attention paid to exotic mores has cost America dearly in the post-Cold War era, as America’s leaders blundered into countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya with little awareness of how radically alien their cultures are. The successes of postwar American occupations in Germany and Japan turned out to be irrelevant in Iraq, a fundamentally tribal land where roughly half of all married couples are also first or second cousins by blood. Saddam Hussein proved not to be a Hitler at the controls of a terrifyingly well-organized state, but an aging bullyboy who had scared a fundamentally fractious population, divided into countless family mafias, into temporarily refraining from drilling holes in each others’ heads.

The withering of public respect for cultural anthropologists has opened the door for a handful of outsiders, such as ornithologist Jared Diamond, to offer the public readable accounts that try to draw broad lessons from the seeming trivia of anthropology. A worthy entrant in this genre is law professor Mark S. Weiner’s account of the continuing global appeal of clannishness: The Rule of the Clan.

The subject of how people align themselves with relatives beyond their nuclear families is central to traditional cultural anthropology, but academics frequently get blinded by what renegade anthropologist Robin Fox calls “ethnographic dazzle.” Each individual’s family tree extends outward almost indefinitely to countless relatives, so different cultures have different rules for which relations matter most. Researchers tend to get lost in the thickets of whether a culture emphasizes ties with the paternal or maternal extended families, in-laws or nephews, cross or parallel cousins, and so on.

1953 Iran Coup - CIA Finally Admits Role

NSA DOMESTIC SPYING "BUILT ON LIES"

Kit Daniels recently wrote a brief but very enlightening news story on InfoWars.com:

“On the August 6 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Dr. Ron Paul responded to this very straightforward statement which appeared in a recent New York Times article:

“‘Some analysts and Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now was a good way to divert attention from the uproar over the N.S.A.’s data-collection programs, and that if it showed the intercepts had uncovered a possible plot, even better.’

“‘Well, it’s not amazing that this is the truth,’ Paul said in response. ‘It’s amazing, I think, that the New York Times would admit it.’

“Paul went on to say that the NSA’s claim of saving Americans from dozens of terrorist attacks is simply rhetoric to prove that the agency’s massive spying on Americans is a good thing.

“‘Their (the NSA officials) claimed successes are all built on lies,’ Paul said.

Paul referred to NSA Deputy Director John Inglis’ admission that the agency’s warrantless wiretapping only prevented maybe one terrorist plot and even that one is questionable, which contradicts the NSA’s earlier claim of 54 thwarted plots.

“‘It’s all based on lies and I think this is probably a benefit to us because most Americans now are being very, very leery of what our government tells us,’ Paul continued. ‘This is a terrible thing to have to go through… who wants to have to give up on their country?’

Ron Paul: People Suffer and Die and then You Wonder Why They hate Us

NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government: Time For A Special Prosecutor

It seems that every day brings a new revelation about the scope of the NSA’s heretofore secret warrantless mass surveillance programs. And as we learn more, the picture becomes increasingly alarming. Last week we discovered that the NSA shares information with a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency called the Special Operations Division (SOD). The DEA uses the information in drug investigations. But it also gives NSA data out to other agencies – in particular, the Internal Revenue Service, which, as you might imagine, is always looking for information on tax cheats.

The Obama Administration repeatedly has assured us that the NSA does not collect the private information of ordinary Americans. Those statements simply are not true. We now know that the agency regularly intercepts and inspects Americans’ phone calls, emails, and other communications, and it shares this information with other federal agencies that use it to investigate drug trafficking and tax evasion. Worse, DEA and IRS agents are told to lie to judges and defense attorneys about their use of NSA data, and about the very existence of the SOD, and to make up stories about how these investigations started so that no one will know information is coming from the NSA’s top secret surveillance programs.

“Now, wait a minute,” you might be saying. “How does a foreign intelligence agency which supposedly is looking for terrorists and only targets non-U.S. persons get ahold of information useful in IRS investigations of American tax cheats?” To answer that question, let’s review this week’s revelations.

Back in 2005, several media outlets reported that NSA has direct access to the stream of communications data, carried over fiber optic cables that connect central telephone switching facilities in the U.S. with one another and with networks in foreign countries. Reports suggested that the NSA had installed equipment referred to as “splitter cabinets” at main phone company offices, where they make a copy of all data traveling on the fiber optic cable and route it into a secret room where computers scan through the information – searching for names and terms that are themselves secret — as it goes by. For years, the federal government refused to comment on these reports. But on August 8, an unnamed senior administration official confirmed this practice to the New York Times.

We also learned that the NSA can grab information off these fiber optic cables in near real time using a tool called XKeyscore (XKS). Searching the firehose of Internet and telephone data as it flows takes an immense amount of computing power. The XKS system dumps a portion of the communications information NSA snatches into a truly immense local storage “cache.” This cache can keep network information for a few days, depending on the amount of traffic. This gives the NSA’s computers time to search through what otherwise would be an unmanageable torrent of emails, phone calls, chats, social network posts, and other communications. And importantly, XKS searches do not involve just communications “metadata”. The XKS system searches the contents of our Internet and telephone communications. Which is directly at odds with repeated Administration statements suggesting that NSA mass surveillance was limited to metadata.

PressTV - 'Israel threatened to take down world in nuclear armageddon

Put Up or Shut Up

That America is in deep moral and legal trouble was pretty much obvious to everyone before Edward Snowden released official documents showing the extent to which the U.S. government has been playing fast and loose with the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans to be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Snowden’s revelations – as explosive as they are – were, in one sense, merely the latest challenge to those of us who took a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. That has been a commitment tested repeatedly in recent years, especially since the 9/11 attacks.

After all the many troubling disclosures — from torture to ”extraordinary renditions” to aggressive war under false pretenses to warrantless wiretaps to lethal drone strikes to whistleblowers prosecutions to the expanded “surveillance state” – it might be time to take a moment for what the Germans call “eine Denkpause,” a “thinking break.” And it is high time to heed and honor the Noah Principle: “No more awards for predicting rain; awards only for building arks.”

This is our summer of discontent. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether that discontent will move us to action. Never in my lifetime have there been such serious challenges to whether the Republic established by the Founders will survive. Immediately after the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin told a questioner that the new structure created “a Republic, if you can keep it.” He was right, of course; it is up to us. So let’s face it. The Obama White House and its co-conspirators in Congress and the Judiciary have thrown the gauntlet down at our feet. It turned out that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. As Annie Dillard, one of my favorite theologians, has put it, “There is only us; there never has been any other.” And as one of my favorite activists/prophets continued to insist, “Do not say there are not enough of us. There ARE enough of us!”

Did You Know War Propaganda Is BANNED Under International Law

CIA Gun-running, Qatar-Libya-Syria.

Areport from CNN’s Jake Tapperhas reintroduced “Benghazi-Gate” to the US media spotlight. The report claims that “dozens” of CIA operatives were on the ground in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and the CIA is going to great lengths to suppress details of them and their whereabouts being released. The report alleges that the CIA is engaged in “unprecedented” attempts to stifle employee leaks, and “intimidation” to keep the secrets of Benghazi hidden, allegedly going as far aschanging the namesof CIA operatives and “dispersing” them around the country.

One suspects this has a single and defined purpose – to hide the CIA’s culpability in supplying arms to known extremists in Libya and Syria. Moreover, the CNN report alludes to the CIA supplying “surface-to-air missiles” from Benghazi to rebels in Syria, but this may only be the tip of the iceberg. The report goes on to state: (my emphasis)

Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out. Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency’s missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations,according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency’s workings. The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress. It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career.

Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi weresecretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.

People used to criticize Bill Clinton for following poll results rather than leading. [Leaders As Followers, By Maureen Dowd, New York Times, January 12, 1997] Political consultants have since solved the problem of the invertebrate pol: Manufacture a fake public opinion that supports the politician they’re working for.

The basic form of pollaganda questions goes something like this:

If I told you that there’s a mayonnaise that tastes every bit as delicious as Hellman’s, but has zero calories, would you buy it?

No NSA Firings over Snowden Affair #N3

Christian Zionism: The Heresy that Undermines Middle East Peace

At least one in four American Christians surveyed recently by Christianity Today magazine said that they believe it is their biblical responsibility to support the nation of Israel. This view is known as Christian Zionism. The Pew Research Center put the figure at 63 per cent among white evangelicals. Christian Zionism is pervasive within mainline American evangelical, charismatic and independent denominations including the Assemblies of God, Pentecostals and Southern Baptists, as well as many of the independent mega-churches. It is less prevalent within the historic denominations, which show a greater respect for the work of the United Nations, support for human rights, the rule of international law and empathy with the Palestinians.The origins of the movement can be traced to the early 19th century when a group of eccentric British Christian leaders began to lobby for Jewish restoration to Palestine as a necessary precondition for the return of Christ. The movement gained traction from the middle of the 19th century when Palestine became strategic to British, French and German colonial interests in the Middle East. Proto-Christian Zionism therefore preceded Jewish Zionism by more than 50 years. Some of Theodore Herzl’s strongest advocates were Christian clergy.

Christian Zionism as a modern theological and political movement embraces the most extreme ideological positions of Zionism. It has become deeply detrimental to a just peace between Palestine and Israel. It propagates a worldview in which the Christian message is reduced to an ideology of empire, colonialism and militarism. In its extreme form, it places an emphasis on apocalyptic events leading to the end of history rather than living Christ’s love and justice today.Followers of Christian Zionism are convinced that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and the capture of Jerusalem in 1967 were the miraculous fulfillment of God’s promises made to Abraham that he would establish Israel as a Jewish nation forever in Palestine.

Tim LaHaye’s infamous Left Behind novels, together with other End Times speculations written by authors such as Hal Lindsey, John Hagee and Pat Robertson, have sold well over 100 million copies. These are supplemented by children’s books, videos and event violent computer games.Read the entire article

Glenn Greenwald "X-Keyscore Has 41 BILLION Internet Records

CFR intelligence list links NSA surveillance to media manipulation

Groucho Marx is famously quoted as once saying, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member!” If one is able to judge others by the company they keep, Groucho’s sentiments could apply to the nefarious Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded in 1921 by the world’s wealthiest and most influential tycoons on the four pillars of unbridled capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, and elitism.

The CFR’s membership sits at 4,700 and aspiring members must be nominated in writing by a current member, and seconded by at least three and no more than four other active members, in order to advance through the membership vetting process.

Thanks to a leak to Cryptome.org, a list of the CFR members with an interest in intelligence matters was leaked. A close examination of the list, which contains affiliations and contact information for the members, yields a relational picture of the close connections between those pushing the National Security Agency’s surveillance agenda and members of the media, including a large contingent of journalists who are with media organizations who attacked this editor for his revelations about NSA surveillance in Europe.

To peruse the CFR list is to understand how the world’s elites control almost every aspect of the government, the military, the intelligence agencies, big business, the media, and academia.

The most alarming names on the CFR list are not merely those of high-ranking members of the military and Foreign Service, including a “Who’s Who” of current and former U.S. commanders, intelligence officers, and diplomats in the Afghan and Iraqi military disasters, but mid-level military, intelligence officers, and State Department employees, including the commander of SEAL Team 2, who are obviously being groomed for higher rank and positions of responsibility.